Anthony Butler. 2012. the Idea of the ANC. Athens: Ohio University Press

Review Essay:

Crisis, History and the Challenge of Reinvention in the Postcolonial: The African National Congress after Apartheid[1]

Laurence Piper

Susan Booysen. 2011. The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Anthony Butler. 2012. The Idea of the ANC. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Stephen Ellis. 2012. External Mission: The ANC in Exile. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.

Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien and Omar Badsha (eds). 2012. One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today. Johannesburg: Wits University Press and South African History Online.

The African National Congress, Africa’s oldest and most famous liberation movement, and home of one of the iconic leaders of modern times, is in crisis. Further, while it may have been in crisis many times before in its history, and a history of adaptability and reinvention, it is unclear exactly if, or more accurately how, it will resolve its current predicament. This is the key common theme of a number of otherwise diverse books recently published on the ANC.

The four books under review, two historical and two more contemporary, represent important versions of the dominant scholarly narratives on the ANC amongst South African intellectuals today.[i] They are in most other respects quite different, however. Booysen and Butler are both political scientists working at the Universities of Witwatersrand and Cape Town, respectively, but the similarity between the books ends there. Booysen’s approach is a policy analysis aimed at the expert, driven largely by evidence, documentary analysis and interviews whereas Butler writes something more like an extended essay, aimed at a wider intellectual audience globally, that weaves the historical and contemporary into one.

In turn, Stephen Ellis and Arianna Lissoni and company are historians. Ellis is a former editor of the influential newsletter Africa Confidential and of African Affairs, and is currently the Desmond Tutu Professor in the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Trained at SOAS, Arianna Lissoni is a postdoctoral research fellow at North-West University, Mafikeng. John Soske is assistant Professor at McGill, Natasha Erlank is associate Professor at the University of Johannesburg, Noor Nieftagodien is chair of the History Workshop and lectures in History at the University of the Witwatersrand, and Omar Badsha is founder and CEO of South African History Online.

Where Ellis’ text bears all the signs of a carefully researched close history on a specific topic, informed heavily by primary evidence from ANC documents and interviews with key ANC figures, Lissoni et al. have compiled a diverse range of arguments about the ANC from its formation in 1912 until the present, varying significantly in theory, theme and style. Emerging from the One Hundred Years of the ANC Conference at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2011, Lissoni et al. have selected and framed the chapters in ways that speak to the diversity of debates both on the ANC and, to some extent, on contemporary historiography in South Africa.

The claim that reading these texts conveys a sense of the ANC in crisis might not seem plausible at first. One reason for scepticism is the ANC’s electoral success for the last twenty years, and its related dominance of the state and much of political society through alliances with the trade union movement and other important civil society formations. However, the current crisis is less about political power, although even on that front the ANC is weakened, as Booysen points out, and more about political authority. To my mind, it is the idea of the ANC as redeemer of an oppressed and impoverished people, based on its liberation credentials and surrounding nationalist mythology that is now in radical decline. This is a moral crisis that calls into question its very identity as liberator of the oppressed. While not discussed in these terms, the books under review allude to this in different ways – the historical texts by unpacking the ANC’s version, and use, of history as myth, and the political by mapping the failings and tensions that confront the ANC today.

In addition to sharing some conception of crisis, the books under review point to the importance of history in analysing the present state of the ANC and asking questions about its future. Some use history as a counter-point to the mythology of the party, most obviously Ellis’ accounts of the South African Communist Party’s little-known dominance of the ANC in exile, while others point to history as a resource for reinvention for the ANC, perhaps best captured in Netshitenzhe’s chapter in Lissoni et al., where he situates current challenges in the longer history of a continuing search for political identity.

A related debate picks out whether the current crisis in the ANC is linked to the arrival of formal democracy in 1994, and whether this really constitutes a rupture in South Africa’s history, as hinted at by Butler, or is better seen as an epiphenomenal shift in the ongoing story of the expansion of the ‘empire of capital’ as advocated by John Saul in Lissoni et al., and for that matter, by current political actors like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Lastly, intertwined with themes of history as myth-busting versus history as a political resource, and the current context as one of political rupture versus political-economic continuity, is the debate on exceptionalism – whether this be the exceptional history of the ANC, the ‘miraculous’ transition to democracy in South Africa, or the liberal-democratic nature of post-apartheid politics.

In what follows I will review the arguments of these books as part of a widely made case that the current identity crisis of the ANC represents a moment in the transition of the party from a nationalist liberation movement to ‘party-state’. My more specific contribution is that, while currently the party inhabits the ambiguous, but also resourceful space of what Booysen (p. xi) calls ‘movement-party’, the trajectory is towards a postcolonial politics of state capture and state-driven class formation similar to other places in Africa and beyond. The reason for this shift is ultimately simple. It is about the fundamental change in the political system brought about by the demise of apartheid and the access to state power and resources enabled by electoral democracy. From being excluded from state power and resources for nearly a century, the ANC now enjoys practically unlimited access to it – the problem is what to do with power. Reaching back to the 1990s, the crisis has deepened as the ANC has found the pursuit of power that is life as a party-state steadily colonising the pursuit of national liberation or life as a political movement. The crisis then, I suggest, is not one of power, but of purpose, and hence moral leadership or liberation nationalism.

At the heart of my analysis will be a distinction between the political and normative projects of the ANC, largely conjoined in the nationalist vision of the anti-apartheid struggle, and now disaggregated. Simply put, during the struggle years, opposition to apartheid defined both the ANC political and normative projects. It sought to end the apartheid system and morally opposed its oppressive and exploitative character. With the demise of apartheid, the moral project has diversified. While the ANC remains politically divided in seeking to remain in office, the vision of what it ought to do for the nation is now contested. The divergent visions of the socio-economic future of South Africa pull in different directions and are exacerbated by emergent processes of class formation, and internal competition for office, produced by ANC rule. These ideological and social divisions also add great complexity, and enduring uncertainty, to coalition formation within the party.

At the same time as arguing that the current identity crisis in the ANC is qualitatively different from previous ones because it is from a position of state power, as outlined by Booysen, I also suggest that the shift from liberation movement to party-movement and increasingly party-state makes the ANC more like liberation movements turned dominant parties in other postcolonial contexts. This is not a point developed in these texts, outside perhaps of Southall’s chapter in Lissoni et al. Thus while history is critical to understanding the ANC in the present and possibilities into the future, it is not just the history of the ANC or South Africa, but rather history in a more comparative frame. It also means that history as myth-making for the ANC after 1994 becomes much more difficult. On this view the ANC becomes less exceptional, as implied by Lissoni et al. and stated by Ellis, albeit that it retains some particularities, and South African studies more widely are opened to analytical insights from other postcolonial contexts.

Butler: The Idea of the ANC

Part of the Ohio Short Histories of Africa, The Idea of the ANC by Anthony Butler is an accessibly written essay-length text, and is best understood as a treatise on how the ANC today understands itself rather than a thorough-going history of ideas. In many ways the key question lurking behind the book becomes clear in the conclusion – does the ANC have the intellectual resources to cope with the challenges of a post-apartheid project of ‘emancipation through modernisation’ (p. 130) or will ‘ambivalence about modernity’ allow political entrepreneurs to summon up ‘empty fantasies about the land and about tradition’ (p. 130)? Notably, Butler holds that ‘social democracy and the developmental state cannot serve as blueprints [for the modernising project] because they emerged in quite different historical circumstances from those which prevail in South Africa today’ (p. 128–9).

To answer this question Butler sets out to explore the key ideas held by party intellectuals and activists that, at least in part, have defined the identity of the ANC historically. ‘For such intellectuals’, says Butler, ‘the ANC is more than an organisation, it is an idea’ (p. 14). In essence then, Butler is unpacking the DNA of the discourse of ANC nationalism, and identifies three notions key to this history: agency, unity and liberation. In the process of engaging with each of these notions, he identifies key intellectual traditions that influence the party until today including ‘self-consciousness’: ‘[T]he ANC is a mechanism of deliberation and reflection; and its favourite object of contemplation is itself’ (p. 119). Other key traditions include communism and Christianity, and for Butler the combination of these three defines intellectual resources at the disposal of the ANC.

Beginning by unpacking ‘agency’, Butler notes that a key theme in ANC discourse is the enduring capacity to act despite sometimes overwhelming oppression, and often uncritical affirmation of the significance of the movement’s contribution to social change. Not only has this ‘subtract[ed] chance, complexity and human history from history’, but yielded an account of South African history ‘dominated by historical inevitability’ (p. 57). Notwithstanding this conclusion, it is not always clear where Butler’s account of South Africa’s history differs from the ANC’s version – a problem perhaps due to the short nature of the work, but also indicative of a wider problem identified by Netshitenzhe in Lissoni et al., that the history of the ANC is that of the struggle of the South African people. How one disentangles these two histories, and myth from fact, is a recurring problem of South African historiography, as Lissoni et al. note.

In ‘Unity’ Butler deals with the issues of identity politics, the exclusive nature of the ANC claim to represent, and the ‘broad church’ of ideologies within the ANC, exploring the centrifugal and centripetal logics of each of these at key points in time, concluding that ‘the ANC has not settled upon a philosophy of government that can reliably generate internal cohesion and social solidarity without threatening to incapacitate opposition or to suppress diversity or dissent’ (p. 91). Key to this is how Butler draws on Zolberg’s (1966) observation that nationalist movements embraced the authoritarian mind-set of their colonial predecessors and affirmed national unity through the party, and practically through state patronage of leaders of key social groups in divided societies.

In ‘Liberation’ Butler points to the current frustration with a lack of ‘economic freedom’ in South Africa, pointing to the contending Marxist and Christian traditions of approaching the issue of poverty, inequality and the market, and suggesting that significant sections of party leadership has limited commitment to liberal-democratic institutions due especially to the lingering influence of Marxist thought. An example of this tension is captured by ANC intellectual Joel Netshitenzhe that ‘the history of the ANC is, in essence, the struggle of the South African people for self-determination … Yet, in assuming the status of an equal participant in elections … the ANC also diminishes it status somewhat, becoming just another party’ (2012: 14).

The Idea of the ANC is a short and thought-provoking interrogation of some key ideas that influence the thinking of ANC intellectuals today, and as such, offers important insight into the kinds of thinking we can expect from the party going forward. It is not, and does not pretend to be, a history of the ANC, or even a history of ideas in the ANC (see Barchiesi in Lissoni et al. for an excellent example of this), although it clearly affirms the importance both of ideas and of the history of ideas. In this regard, it is creditable how Butler plays more attention to Christianity and its influence on the contemporary ANC than do most historians, and especially ANC intellectuals.